Discovering What We Actually Have
At The Salvation Army Australia, we're facing what I call the "Paper Mountain" - we have this paper mountain, and we don't know what's in most of it. We don't know whether it helps us, whether it hurts us. We know it costs us money every year to store it, but we don't know what's in it.
Small Wins Make Big Differences
I've already been able to make some wins - like when I first told my organization how many archive boxes they have. That was something they never knew, and just because I pushed the data hard enough and pulled it together, we could start reporting. It's funny - I do something which I think is really obvious, like count the archive boxes, and people look at me and say, "We've never known how many archive boxes we have!"
The Unknown Scale of Our Challenge
We have over 2,000 physical locations in the country, and people tell me about shipping containers they have out the back. So while I can say how many archive boxes are in commercial storage, there's still a significant portion that's unknown. That's my mission for the next year - to wrestle with the Paper Mountain.
